AN ARAB terrorist plotting to explode a “dirty” radioactive bomb in London is exposed today by the News of the World.

Evil Samir Yatim is poised to provide nuclear material which would bring death to the capital’s streets.

Our investigators, posing as Muslim extremists, tracked down the 52-year-old arms dealer to his lair on Spain’s Costa del Sol.

Yatim -who is known to MI5 and the FBI and classed as “highly dangerous”- said he could arrange for five kilos of Russian iridium-192 to be smuggled from Istanbul in Turkey, hidden in a car batteries.

He demanded payment of E1.3 million -and chillingly promised: “I can send the iridium to London, no problem. Once it’s in Europe it’s like sending vegetables.”

At a further meeting in Benalmádena, near Torremolinos, Yatim boasted: “I don’t care who this stuff is going to, angels or the devil. I don’t give a damn.”

Deported

Triggering a convential semtex bomb wrapped in the iridium -192 isotope in a city centre would cause hundreds of casualties and log-term contamination.

Iridium has been linked to terror before. In 1978 a pellet of the metal containing poisonous ricin was fired by a Soviet agent into the thigh of Bulgarian exile Georgi Markov near London’s Waterloo. He died four days later.

Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has said it his “religious duty” to obtain radioactive material to build a dirty bomb.

And Tony Blair has declared that he fears terrorists will “deliver a catastrophe to our world” with such a weapon. Lebanese Yatim can make the Prime Minister’s fear a terrible reality. Yatim has a long record in terrorism -and he loathes Britain.

He has sold arms to the IRA and in 1967 organized military training for IRA men in Jordan. He lived in Britain and Ireland for 33 years, but was deported to Syria after serving prison sentences here for

The contact met Yatim at a flat in the Spanish mountain town of Ronda, behind Marbella.

The Irish contact explained: “Things got too scary for me when I saw guns and surface-to-air missiles in a cupboard in the lounge. These people were too dangerous to deal with.”

He was right. When the News of the World met Yatim offering to buy radioactive material he told us: “I deal in drugs, guns and arms. I can arrange radioactive material if it is available. It comes from the former Soviet Union through Turkey. You can’t just order what you want, you have to take what is available on the market.”

Yatim is already known to have smuggled at least one consignment of iridium from Istanbul. He said uranium could also be available. The material would be brought out by ship or car.

Yatim wanted a E3,000 deposit and said an expert of our choice could inspect the material in Istanbul.

“From there we can finish the deal,” he said. “We can´t talk about there things on the phone. My phone is tapped. I have to send people to Turkey.”

Coolly drawing on a cigarette he added: “For uranium you can expect to pay from $2 million (E 1.3 million), but it may vary. If you are willing to buy I am willing to sell. My people are ready. A minimum of live kilos of material can be arranged.

“If you are serious you must move in the next 72 hours.”

On Tuesday last week the News of the World duped Yatim again -when he tried to recruit more investigators to drive from Turkey to Spain with isotopes hidden in false car batteries.

Guards

At a meeting in Benalmádena´s Riviera hotel he said: “The stuff comes from Georgia into Turkey from nuclear places inside Russia.

“They are supposed to have guards but nobody has been paid for months so the stuff is up for sale.”

Yatim makes no secret of his hatred of the West.

“F*** Tony Blair and Bush, and their governments,” he said. “Saddam is finished but there are still revolutionaries like me. If I had a bomb now to fly to Britain and drop it on England I would.”

Yatim may be interested to know our dossier on his activities is being handed to authorities of Britain and Spain.

* Top Secret: plutonium in Spain

Three months after September 11th, police arrested a drug addict in Madrid, Angel Moreno, when introduced into a cylinder supposedly Spain radioactive material. What he had, he confessed to "an Arab from the Costa del Sol", the Lebanese arms dealer Samir Yatim, formerly associated with terrorist groups.

A painter with a blue cylinder

That day, Angel Moreno Perez, born in Huelva on June 9, 1967, a professional painter and a tortured relationship with drugs, was arrested just inside earth. He came to Spain on a flight from Athens (Greece). The agents of the Central Narcotics Brigade of the operation- -encargados immediately moved him to the living airport X-ray and found that in the large intestine wearing a cylinder about 20 centimetres long and 1.5 in diameter that had inserted through the anus: "The airport radiologist saw it was not drugs, but something strange, and asked to transfer to a hospital," they recall policemen who were present at the recognition.

Maximum alert

With the utmost care and guarded by men NBC team, the yonquipintor of Huelva was driven to the Gregorio Maranon Hospital. Once at the hospital, they were given laxatives to expel the cylinder, which won the 9th, almost 48 hours after his arrest.

Fearing that the contents of the tube to contaminate with their radiation doctors and police, the NBC team moved the cylinder in an airtight container to host the CIEMAT (Centre for Energy, Environment and Technology) has in University City Madrid. There, the tube was subjected to all kinds of tests. No one dared to open it to check its contents, but research sources confirm that an opinion of "one professor of Atomic Energy of a University of Barcelona said that it was an isotope of plutonium," commonly used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons .

Four years after the arrival of the mysterious cylinder, it is not yet open due to fear of provoking a radioactive contamination. Investigating Court 21 of Madrid -In charge of the case-filed the proceedings because they can not be formulated any accusation against Moreno. The case, kept secret by the government-in fact it has on file Angel Moreno's arrest for a crime "against public health" - featured components of a large plot of arms trafficking. After the bombing of Al Qaeda's September 11, 2001 increased police alarms to detect movements that they should think that any terrorist group was preparing to buy chemical or nuclear weapons.

Blow

That was the situation when, a few weeks later, the Central Narcotics Unit received a tip from one of its most active informers in the street. The employee claimed that Samir Yatim, a known weapons dealer who lived in the Costa del Sol, was interested in acquiring nuclear material to a group of radical Chechens, close to the Muslim separatists, which could provide plutonium for a nuclear arsenal former USSR.

Yatim, a Lebanese supporter of the Palestinian cause, married to an Englishwoman, is contained in the files of Western intelligence services. Known for MI5 (British intelligence), he was jailed in the UK, where he had maintained close relations with the IRA (Irish Republican Army) terrorist group that presumably would have sold weapons. Yatim was also in a Turkish prison, where he would have contacted a group of Chechens who were willing to sell nuclear material.

In search of funding sources

However, at that time no money to pay the down payment demanded by the nuclear traffickers. "Yatim 25,000 or $ 30,000 needed to send him a sample of the material," recall sources of the case. So he met in Torremolinos with another Arab, who "taught a caricature of Bin Laden giving Bush the ass", relate to the same sources, and proposed to finance the trip and the first part of the operation. The agents believed his informant, which earlier had provided good services- especially when they checked the background of Yatim.

The operation, which was at all times considered by the police and the judge as a delivery controlled- was launched. The mole provided the Lebanese seeking funding to bring a sample of radioactive material. The delivery would be in Istanbul Turkey) and the transaction price was $ 30,000. Confident contacted a Gypsy drug dealer Dos Hermanas (Seville), named Rafael, who agreed to pay for the operation, with the commitment that the trip would also take advantage to bring heroin. Selling drugs in Seville, Rafael repaid many times your investment.

Seville Turkey in a Renault 21

So in late November 2001 was ready the expedition. "They left Seville in a Renault 21 with a ca leta (heroin hidden hide zone)," recalls one of the connoisseurs of history. Obviously, none of the leaders going to risk, so they recruited people you trust for the trip. In the car was Angel Moreno Perez, an addict with a history of theft and drug answered to the gypsy. Beside him, Maurice Chamieh, delegate to the trip Samir Yatim but also informed the

Police informer. With them he was also a Spanish woman named Eugenia, divorced and had been involved in a web of fake dollars.

A flat in Istanbul

One of the people who controlled the operation recalls: "The car broke down in Greece, stopped. They had the meeting in Istanbul and needed more money to continue. We had to send them $ 4,000 more. " Seeing that the his- His was complicated, Eugenia returned to Spain from Athens, while Maurice and Angel spent two weeks in a Greek hotel, with the car repaired, they went to the Turkish border, but only the last entered Turkey, where they collected men of Chechen traffickers.

Angel Moreno then told the Spanish police after his arrest in Barajas, some individuals took him "several bars in Istanbul. I was drunk and put me in an apartment. At gunpoint they forced me to stick a cylinder by the ass. “Traffickers ordered to bring the cylinder to "an Arab from the Costa del Sol". After that, only Angel remembered waking up "on a beach in Greece" where he went to Athens airport. On 7 December he took a plane to Madrid. According to his testimony, he did not know what was in the pipe and thought it was going to be transported from Turkey was heroin. A travelling companion, Angel explained that he had seen "a lot of heroin" in the room of a Turkish floor and that "you put an egg in the ass".

Plutonium hits Madrid

On December 7, 2001 Maurice and Angel Barajas reached from Athens. The police alerted by his confident, missed Maurice and arrested the Spanish addict. Angel Moreno was released on December 13, but soon after-the January 5, 2002 he was arrested in Ayamonte (Huelva) while travelling in a car in which the Civil Guard found 850 grams of heroin. He was sentenced to

three years and five months in prison for a crime against public health. Months later, Maurice, the man who accompanied him on his trip to Turkey, died of respiratory failure at a hostel in the centre of Madrid.

As he reported by the informant to the police, which brought in their gut Angel was a capsule of radioactive material to make dirty bombs. According to the informant, the intention to buy the sample Yatim was offering it to the highest bidder. In 2003, a year and a half after this operation, some British media reported that Yatim tried to introduce in the UK iridio192 from Istanbul hidden in car batteries. The iridio192 is a highly dangerous nuclear material, mixed with a conventional explosive, such as Semtex, can cause hundreds of deaths and a long period of pollution. According to the same media, Yatim –deported to Syria for the British ones selling weapons to the IRA authorities since the sixties and had offered nuclear material from the former USSR to Irish terrorists.

Call the FBI

Which would be the biggest operation ever carried out in Spain against the arms trade he failed to materialize due to the lack of means to open the mysterious cylinder Angel Moreno carried in your gut. Police sources have assured that the American FBI interview, through its liaison officers posted to the embassy in Madrid, was interested in the operation and even proposed taking over the cylinder, without result. Four years later, the case remains secret and nobody has been able to know what exactly you put your ass in the house painter, something "that would be funny, if we were talking about something as serious," says a source close to the research.

Last tip: 11M

One of the traveller’s plutonium ended up in prison, another died. Woman has not been heard later. Gypsy dealer who financed the operation continues to rule a village in Dos Hermanas. And the confident operation won credibility with the police today. Following charges paid by the state and the funds reserved by their snitch, valuable though not always politically correct. In fact, he was one of those who warned before the attacks of March 11 in Madrid that something terrible was brewing. So Judge Del Olmo has made him protected witness and brought it to escort their attempts to clarify every detail the greatest terrorist massacre in Spain.